Thursday, July 14, 2011

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[What follows is an unedited letter sent by Darryl Genis, Peter Lance’s DUI attorney, in response to a retraction request issued to the Santa Barbara News-Press on behalf of Kasi Beutel]

Dear Mr. Nye, and Dear Ms. Beutel:

It has come to my attention that collectively you have published upon the internet (http://www.edhat.com/daypics2011/20110711153541.pdf) a letter dated July 11, 2011 that holds me out to professional ridicule based upon the contents of paragraphs number five and six of page 3 of said letter.

In paragraph six of page two, you specifically state that I “never asked for all arrests made by Officer Beutel” and go on to enumerate 5 Vehicle Code sections which I allegedly failed to specify in my CPRA/FOIA requests (in spite of the fact that I enumerated 10 vehicle Code sections and 2 Penal Code sections). Attached are copies of my actual requests sent to the SBPD on May 11th and May 17th, 2011 which prove that your published claim is patently false and defamatory.

DOCUMENT

In response to these Public Record Acts requests the SBPD provided my office with the total compilation of Officer Beutel’s DUI arrests for 2009 and 2010. See pdfs of our letters attached.

Since your client is Kasi Beutel and at the time of our requests, and at all times thereafter leading up to the writing of your letter, she, and therefore you, had access to the official statistics cited above, and to copies of my CPRA/FOIA requests, she knew and you should have known, that the above mentioned statement contained in your July 11th 2011 letter was false. Thus, in causing that letter to be sent to The Santa Barbara Independent and other media such as Edhat.com you and your client have acted with actual malice, as defined in New York Times. vs. Sullivan 376 U.S. 254 (1964) as “reckless disregard for the truth.”

Since the aforementioned false statement regarding my due diligence with the SBPD on Ms. Beutel’s DUI arrest statistics is libel per se (in that it goes to my professional conduct as an attorney) I demand an immediate retraction. Each day you allow this defamatory statement to remain in the public domain, the damage to my reputation increases.

There are a number of other false and defamatory statements in your letters of July 11th and 12th that damage the reputation of my client Peter Lance, but Mr. Lance and the Santa Barbara News-Press will address that additional libel via separate counsel.

Y'all:As Richie Brockelman, a wannabee PI on the Rockford series, was wont to say: The thing of it is, is:So, it's business as usual that a savvy, “successful” CPA accountant-couple somehow manages to sign up for and then max-out twenty-f***ing four (24) credit cards, then enter, individually, into two separate bankruptcies in which they comfortably homestead two separate residences, all to the detriment of many, many creditors, left holding air in a jug? And all this is done while they embark on 10+ luxury cruises?The putative dates of marriage, apparently a moveable and disputed feast, bear heavily not only on the separate property issues involved in bankruptcy and homesteads, but on the distribution of property upon dissolution of the putative marriage.If any of y'all don't smell rats in the rigging of the Beutels, please don't ask the rest of us to sail with you.Then, following the dual bankruptcies and divorce, Kagi Beutel decides that accounting is not her strong suit. She decides that after her life as a post 10+cruise-ship luxury habitue, 24-defaulted and maxed-out-credit-card-debtor, and her bankrupted, misbegotten youth, at age 32, her real calling is to be a law enforcement officer for truth, justice and the American way.I’ll bet we all know family members who have behaved somewhat as badly, but I’ll also bet we wouldn’t volunteer to attest as to their trustworthiness.Just sayin’Michael Ganschow

I tried to watch the Lance interview and it froze my computer. Sort of like the deep freeze that emanates from Peter Lance's eyes when he decides to destroy your life for cutting in front of him in the line for the new Harry Potter movie, or because you served him his soup cold, or put too much starch in his shirts. And besides, it's much more fun watching "Between Two Ferns" with Zach Galafanakis.

Seriously folks, I read Nye's letter and the Genis letter, but I refuse to read Lance's muck again. Can anyone explain how, if Lance and Genis made a thorough request for Beutel's DUI collars, they did not come up with the magical 331 that Nye they should have come up with, even though despite what Nye says Genis did his due diligence, blah blah blah. Inquiring minds want to know, but only because Dancing With the Stars isn't on.

The pairing of Lance's runaway OCD in the service of "investigative journalism" with Worthen's witless sycophancy is crushing.

But have no fear: I waded through this Public Access horror-show to pull the gems from the overall dreck.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I skipped almost all of the 50-odd minutes as Worthen mined crucial Peter Lance biographical details ('but first, the Family!'), whilst simultaneously grooming and fluffing him, before a liberal feather-dusting of Lance's oh-so-serious-journalist-blue-pinstriped, collared shirt.

Worthen:Those that have read the stories know you were stopped for drunk driving...

Lance:I was stopped for drunk driving about an hour after midnight, and ... aah...an hour... 1-0-6 AM.. I don't want to get into the specifics of it, only because I haven't used the series in the News-Press to try my case, contrary to what some people thought. Some people.... [snip]

(46:30)... not only that, but there are all kinds of other misstatements, that Nick Welsh of the Independent picked up on, claiming that I was asleep behind the wheel -- absolutely outrageous and untrue, and by the way...

- - - - - - - -[So, why is Lance sending a Demand for Apology to Welsh for (almost) saying in his Poodle column that Lance was driving while drunk? The man says so himself! On the TV!]- - - - - - - -

Worthen:I dont know of any study correlating blood alcohol level to accidents, to injuries, to... anything.And yet that's the criteria for the final arrest.

Lance:Yeah, whether you're .09 or above and that's one of the two charges that you typically face, and you also face separate tribunal at the DMV, where you can lose your license, In California it's a serious thing TO LOSE YOUR LICENSE.

Worthen:Yeah, it's double jeapardy, and if anyone had the guts to take it all the way to the US Supreme Court... but it's never worth that.

Lance:Well... anyway, so the point is ... the idea that...

- - - - - - - -[Okay, the last 3 minutes of the tape almost make wading through the other 50 minutes worth it. The Crazy is very strong here. Only exceeded by the Self-Importance. Of both men on the TV.]- - - - - - - -

Lance [quoted mid-sentence in the interest of brevity]:.... now we have seven, which we're going to present at a hearing, on the 26th of July in front of Judge Brian Hill. Which brings me to the proceedings today and the news..

Worthen:Yeah tell me what happens...

Lance:I have three stories that I'm preparing for next week with the News-Press. And one of the stories has to do with the complaint process that's virtually non-existent in the Santa Barbara Police department. Chief Sanchez has a brochure encouraging complaints, and while they have a form that you can pick up, the irony is that when you go to the police department, they don't time and date stamp it.

Now when have you ever heard of a government agency that you file with that doesn't date it or time it? Well, when they do that, then you can't argue when you never hear from them again 'well, what happened to my complaint?' 'Did you file a complaint? Show us the proof..' and you could have a copy of the thing, but without a time and date stamp you can't prove it.

Lance:... the Judge... they determined that somehow the transcript that I got from the Administrator, that I got a CD [*garbled*] they cllaim that part of it was sealed, even though it never said sealed, And Judge Hill today put a gag order on me, prohibiting me from telling that story in print, and he gagged the News-Press. And that's a Pentagon Papers level case, I actually spoke up during the trial I said "Judge, you're competing with the First Amendment here, I'm gonna publish this piece next week and you can decide what you're gonna do with me. And so maybe you need to interview me from a jail cell next week if we do this." But I'll go to jail any day in defense of the First Amendment.

Worthen:Aight. It's unbelievable that ... ahhh.... they can gag you from writing the truth. and..

Lance:It's a misdemenor DUI case... it's outrageous, frankly. And I think that they'll...

Worthern:It's a lot deeper than that.. It's all the free money that,,. uuuh, comes from the Government then get abused at the local level. Being that local taxpayer, isn't paying for it...

Lance:Well anyway, Judge Hill will get a chance to read my article and decide for himself whether he thinks sanctions against me or the New-Press are... errrr...worth it

Worthen:This story is going to go on and on; hopefully the Justice Department will get involved.

Lance:I hope the Justice department does, and I want the Attorney General of Californai, Camilla Harris to get involved -- I don't trust the Justice Department.

Binky, thank you. You really took a bullet for the team. This is almost unbearable, a train wreck of absolute lunacy over a little DUI. As for Lance, he's referring to an issue discussed in a second letter from Beutel's lawyer to the N-P. Zwoirle can send it to you if you haven't already seen it. It actually will be interesting if the N-P prints more of Lance's dreck in the face of a gag order (I had not heard about that), and with any luck Lance, Genis, Wendy, Scotty Stapleton and Von Nipplesburger will all share a cell together in defense of the First Amendment. Sort of like how they exposed Jerry Roberts, I remember that winning, hmm, no awards!

Unlike the Jerry Roberts story about kiddie porn on his computer (which was a total smear job) , there are some allegations that are worth looking into here. I hope the SBPD does an investigation on this matter as well as how they screen new hires. If I were in Cam Sanchez's place, I would take this more seriously.

jfklbj: I don't know we can say the SBPD isn't taking this seriously, just that they haven't said squat since sending out that press release the day after the Lance articles began. You are absolutely right, at the very least they should look into their screening processes, because obviously Beutel had/has some red flags vis-a-vis her financial acumen. I still have trouble extrapolating that issue to Peter Lance blowing a .09. Maybe the breathalyzer ran up some serious credit card bills too.

I perused the N-P today and all I saw was a guest editorial/letter from a retired police officer that hewed to the party line. No bombshells, legitimate or not, from the great Peter Lance.

When she gets comfortable with gaming the system, to the tune of $200,000 in defaulted credit card debt, twenty-four defaulted credit cards (24), and $270,000 in a 2nd bankruptcy homestead (a no-no), the pattern begins to take shape. When she herself gets out of shape: http://www.chli.com/wellness_connecti...she again games the media.When she herself decides to advertise her 1997 medieval wedding ceremony and have someone pay to decorate her/Todd's homesteaded home (remember there should only be one) accordingly:http://www.hgtv.com/designers-challen...

Oops! She now has decided that she didn't actually get married on May 31, 1997 in that medieval-themed ceremony, attested to above and nicely decorated-for. It would negatively impact the two bankruptcy filings, don't ya know.

Peter Lance has not fabricated the above facts; they are documented as above and in his published articles.

Any dispassionate observer can see the pattern of irresponsibility, dishonesty, self-aggrandizement, and lieing; the facts that several documents were executed under penalty of perjury in both federal and state court elevate the lies to perjury. What Peter Lance has undertaken is to dot the "I"s and cross the "T"s upon the demonstrated character of Kasi Beutel as a pathologic predator.

Stay tuned. The best is yet to come. The fat lady has not sung so far. It shouldn't be a long wait.

A criminal prosecution of Kasi Beutel is a remote possibility, the statute of limitations notwithstanding, given the protection that the legal, judicial and institutional bastions have arrayed to protect "theirs" in our culture over the last couple centuries. Just look at the unfolding Murdoch scandal, which will surely leave Rupert, Wendi and Jimmy free to enjoy their accumulated billions.

As I have intimated, patent and express evidence shall hit the proverbial fan this week that documents, beyond a doubt, reasonable or Republican, that Kasi Beutel intentionally misrepresented, under oath, her marriage date, for the purpose of putting herself, economically and legally, to her personal advantage.

Let's let that fallout settle before we consider your further questions.

All y’all:So, while the fat lady has not yet entered the courtroom in the prosecution of Peter Lance, the minister who married Kasi Beutel has now sworn to her animated and directed efforts to persuade him to falsify (forge) the Los Angeles marriage certificate that he had certified and filed. He certified the marriage and filed the certified marriage certificate in 1999. He has now filed a sworn declaration stating that she called him in 2005 as her divorce from Todd Beutel was imminent; she implored him to backdate the marriage certificate that he had filed six years before so that she could receive more “child support.”O.K. Child support is not a function of the length of the marriage in California, nor does it even require a marriage; nobody claims that Ms Beutel is bright or forthcoming. On the other hand, in California, spousal support, specifically the length the paying spouse is bound to support the other in the style he or she has become accustomed to, is generally a function of the period of the marriage, specifically for half the length of a “short marriage”, i.e. one of less than 10 years duration. Inferences about using her children are probably obvious.Please read the sworn declaration of Thomas James, the minister who both presided over the gala and very expensive medieval/Renaissance marriage ceremony in 1997, and who also presided over the more humble ceremony in 1999. Please email me at cmganschow@gmail.com for a pdf copy of Reverend James’ sworn and filed declaration.As I receive other filed public records, e.g., the divorce declarations in which Ms Beutel documents prior fraud by Mr. Beutel and her, I shall make them similarly available.Stay tuned.